No room at the wharf? Historic ship seeks safe harbour in Melbourne

She spent long years helping shepherd thousands of ships to safe harbour in Melbourne, but the good ship Wyuna now floats in peril herself, with no port to call her own.

For want of a berth, she swings at lonely anchor in Bell Bay on Tasmania’s Tamar River, her time running down.

The Wyuna in an earlier guise as a training and radio ship. She is now stranded in Tasmania.

No crew is aboard.

More than a decade ago, mining billionaire Clive Palmer planned to convert Wyuna into a floating pleasure palace. It came to nothing, just as proposals by her latest owners to sail Wyuna to Melbourne have foundered over the past two years, despite a full refit.

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Their problem, they say, is that authorities have rebuffed all their efforts to find a berth in Melbourne.

Meanwhile, Tasmania’s port authorities have run out of patience and want the old ship gone, threatening otherwise to seize her and sell her, possibly to be broken up for scrap.

Wyuna, a stately old vessel, is said to be the world’s last remaining pilot cutter. She was for two decades home to Port Phillip’s maritime pilots, who guided ships in from Bass Strait to Melbourne’s docks.

A group of Victorian maritime enthusiasts and business leaders wants to bring Wyuna home to Melbourne to be maintained, displayed and used as a special example of the city’s maritime history.

“We have been talking with Soldier On to make the ship a wellbeing drop-in centre as the indications are that these ex-service personnel would love to maintain the ship,” says Max Bryant, president of the Western Port Oberon Association Inc of the Victorian Maritime Centre, which owns the 65-year-old cutter.

“The ship’s end use will be a school camp for kids: with 48 cabins, kids will live aboard for seven to 10 days, learning about life at sea.”

But Mr Bryant and his colleagues haven’t been able to secure a berth on Melbourne’s docks.

In desperation, they’ve tried every port and harbour from Portland in the south-west of Victoria to Eden in the south-east of NSW, he said. Nothing doing.

The Victorian Maritime Centre, he said, had a solid business plan and, having refitted the ship from a mere shell to sea-going standard, had already proved it could maintain the vessel.

The Victorian government had indicated it would provide financial assistance, but only if a berth was found first, he added.

However, efforts to secure berths at Docklands or at Princes Pier had failed, Mr Bryant said.

A spokesman for Parks Victoria, which controls about 40 piers around Port Phillip and Westernport, said he wasn’t aware whether the Wyuna’s backers had submitted a proposal. However, most of Parks’ piers would be too exposed to suit a vessel like the Wyuna, he said.

A spokesman for the Port of Melbourne said that at this stage, no official proposal or business plan had been submitted by Wyuna’s owners. The port was a commercial operation for bulk imports and exports, and it appeared unlikely it would have a berth suitable for a permanent historical exhibition.

The Wyuna was, from the early 1950s to the 1970s, the sea-going home of Port Phillip Bay’s maritime pilots.

When a ship approached, the Wyuna would meet it beyond the heads and transfer one of its pilots by workboat, with the visiting vessel first coming to a dead stop.

The pilot from the Wyuna would then skipper the vessel in to Port Phillip Bay and to the Port of Melbourne.

But in the early 1970s the pilot service switched to fast launches, allowing pilots to board while ships were still under way, and the cutter lost its role.

In 1979, the Wyuna was sold to the Australian Maritime College in Launceston, Tasmania as a training ship.

Her latter troubles began in 2004 when Clive Palmer bought her through his mining company, Mineralogy Pty Ltd, with grand plans to convert Wyuna as a luxury yacht.

But after that and subsequent plans came to nothing, she was donated in 2013 to the Western Port Oberon Association, which proposes to establish a maritime tourist centre at Hastings, with its primary attraction a decommissioned Oberon Class submarine, and where the association hopes Wyuna will eventually end up.